HAROLD BRODKEY
601
concerning meritorious and worthwhile endeavors are embodied in
real, or far from ideal, but very profound, real and profound , pro–
foundly
worthwhile
sets of actions of some overt kind of which you
and I are indirectly part by means of our support in whatever ways
we manifest that support.
In life we are taught grammar. We are told what it is.
It
is what
someone who tells us about it says it is if they have power, if they are
functioning well, and if we are within their sphere of influence and if
others are. And then we learn further it is what experience teaches us
it is in the light of other powers. We may not always admit this but
we practice it. And the success of living examples with the peculiar
webbing of powers and attachments to various kinds of correctness
prepares us for notions of ideal argument which have little to do with
the new politics which I am adumbrating here and which are in exis–
tence although in a somewhat formless way . What are we to do?
Grammar is broadly defined as the underlying structures of a
language that inform utterance in such a way, that shape it so, that it
can convey meaning. That signifies that one intends to say something
that others can comprehend some of, enough of, that a third party
would judge meaning to have been conveyed. But the third party has
to be a human being, or a programmed computer: the whole process
is subject to human error. And coercion . And that is to say, human
politics .
And human agency.
I believe one is often guilty by agency in this manner just as one
is sometimes morally better off by agency in this manner .
By language - rather than by money and force - since the time
of the Greeks and Romans- by means of public argument a degree
of civilization, not yet peaceful, not yet independent of overt or hid–
den slavery, has evolved.
If
meaning is consistently and inescapably political then we
cannot claim the dignity of speaking for God or mind or man. We
can speak for a degree of civilization which in this country always
has meant and still means a political civilization .
And the instability of footing of such political speech is based
on the reality of force and repression of one kind and another and by
the reality of false arguments which stabilize all discussion by defin–
ing unideal ideals as ideal; that is to say, ideals-at-the-moment, right
now, in this or that emergency as we live. I do not see the possibility
